Week 43 Acts 2
I was noticing the numerical data Luke gave on how quickly the church grew.
In chapter 1 he said there were 120 loyal followers of the Lord (there were likely more than that in total but that was the core group in Jerusalem).
Luke estimated that after the sudden arrival of the Holy Spirit 3000 people came into the church.
And before too long 5000 more came to belief.
After that I found some more church-growth data but it was qualitative:
More and more people believed and were brought to the Lord
The (number of) believers rapidly multiplied
The number of believers greatly increased in Jerusalem.
I sketched out a rough graph. I knew that my axes were a bit shaky – I estimated some values on both my x (time) and y (numbers) lines (in fact I flat-out cheated with some numbers – the three times where Luke didn’t give exact numerical data I added an arbitrary 1000 people). But I figure the basic trendline was pretty obvious & indisputable. It was all up…up…up for awhile – maybe weeks or months.
Of course then Saul of Tarsus arrived with his religiously-sanctioned oppression and so the believers bugged-out en masse (except the apostles). So my graph stepped off a cliff.
Anyway the exercise got me thinking about a related question: how did the leaders manage the sudden growth? And another question in the back of my mind was: what-all was going on in the church as it expanded?
Note: see Acts 1:15 2:41 4:4 5:14 6:1 6:7 8:1 (NLT)